TLDR: Leveraging Ceramic.network, we will improve the accessibility, usability and value of data in the Nouniverse, providing users with greater control and ownership over their data through the use of decentralized identifiers (DIDs), enabling interoperability and composability of data across different applications. During this process, our deliverable will simultaneously mitigate some challenges with data fragmentation, while improving data availability, data composability, and establishing the foundation for universal identity within the Nouniverse.
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What is Ceramic? The Ceramic Network is a decentralized protocol and platform that enables the creation of decentralized networks that can store and manage large amounts of data in a secure, trustable, and efficient manner.
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What is the goal of the Nounish-Ceramic Network? To empower nounish developers with permissionless, composable data and delight nounish users with novel yet intuitive interfaces along with greater control and ownership over their data.
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Key benefits of the network: Innovative applications and user experiences from data-availability and data-composability, reduced data and application fragmentation, increased data sovereignty, ease of integration and development, improved interoperability and composability among participating applications in the ecosystem.
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What problems are being addressed? Universal identity, data and application fragmentation, data availability, and data composability.
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Who are the team members? Al409: 2x Lil Noun DAO resident, and Agora Nouner Delegate Winner. Baba: Datapod Co-Lead for Lil Nouns, Lil Nouns grants committee multi-sig signer and Nouns DAO Governance Prop House Mandate Winner. Ripe, Volky: Prop House Winners, BuilderDAO contributors. Brunes, Champion Score: Ex-Stripe, Ex-Google, and Nouns Governance Prop House Mandate Winners.
Problem Statement
As the DAO grows, people must navigate an environment that is increasingly fragmented. The data produced by many small and large applications are scattered, siloed and inconsistent in format and structure, making it difficult for users to access and utilize. This fragmentation lowers the accessibility, usability, and value of the data, and limits the potential insights and innovations that can be gained from it.
In addition, only a small subset of all data in the Nouniverse is stored on-chain, which can create challenges for developers and users who need to access and use this data. In a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), data is a critical asset that drives decision-making, governance, and value creation. Therefore, it is important for a DAO to have a decentralized data network like Ceramic that provides users with greater control and ownership of their data, and enables interoperability and composability of data across different applications, including off-chain data.
Vision: In a future wherein permissionless data collaboration achieves critical mass within the DAO, users would have unprecedented control and ownership over their data, with the ability to easily share and reuse it across different participating applications. The decentralized nature of Ceramic would ensure that data is stored securely and efficiently, without the risk of censorship or centralization. The interoperability and composability enabled by Ceramic would lead to a proliferation of innovative and user-centric applications, breaking down the barriers that currently exist between different platforms and ecosystems. The benefits of this future would extend beyond just the technical members of the DAO, as all users would be able to take advantage of the seamless and intuitive interfaces enabled by the data network. The adoption of Ceramic would be a major step towards a more open and equitable internet, where data is treated as a commons to be shared and nurtured, rather than a commodity to be monetized and controlled.
Objectives
- To create a decentralized data network and database that can make it easier for people to access, understand and use data in the Nouniverse.
- To give people more control and ownership over their data through the use of decentralized identifiers (DIDs).
- To make it possible for different applications to share and use data, creating new possibilities for how data can be used.
- To provide developers with access to a permissionless data layer, which includes information on governance, funding, and user activity for the DAO.
- To make it easy for developers to integrate with and build on top of the data that the DAO has collected.
- To enable developers to tap into the network effects of the DAO by allowing their applications to connect and interact with each other.
- To enable a more open and equitable internet where data is treated as a shared resource rather than a commodity that can be controlled and monetized.
Deliverables - 4 Month Timeline
To achieve these objectives, we will deliver the following components: infrastructure, applications, and services.
Infrastructure: The infrastructure component involves deploying a Ceramic network node that runs an instance of ComposeDB, the decentralized, composable graph database. This node will serve the applications, which can read and write data permissionlessly (subject to data ownership constraints). The raw data backing this database is stored in a separate IPFS node. In order to bootstrap application use cases, relevant on-chain and off-chain data will be imported, processed and stored into ComposeDB. The data will be attributed with relationships for composability and made available via a GraphQL API.
Applications: Three applications will be deployed on the Ceramic network by the core team upon completion.
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NounsID - The identity interface for the Nouniverse. Aims to address the challenge of data fragmentation, while improving data availability, data composability, and establishing the foundation for a permissionless, composable, universal identity. This identity layer, will enable greater control and ownership over user data through the use of decentralized identifiers (DIDs), enabling interoperability and composability of data across different applications.
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Builder Profile - Builder profiles (nounish.cv) are meant to give a full picture of a nounish builder’s contributions to the Nouniverse.
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Noundry - Will integrate with the Ceramic network, leveraging its decentralized datastore, and our universal identity (NounsID). Noundry Ceramic Integration may include but are not limited by the following features:
- Upload your traits once, use it all across the ecosystem! - Create your artist profile and keep your own provenance records - Include metadata with your artwork. Give it name & context.
- Remix & collab on everything, powered by CC0 Some ideas of integrations to harness this data:
- Noundry contests, to sign up your traits and try to make them into official Nouns traits.
- Builder DAO, to boot a new DAO with Nounish artwork using a collection of existing traits.
- Noun DAO UIs, to show tooltips over the Nouns with more info about the traits and their artists
- Other features to explore: cross-dao artwork compatibility by mapping out trait categories, templates, sizes & color palettes - Scraping of existing artwork and contacting artists to seed their profiles - Offering the artwork in multiple formats (svg, png) for better compatibility with different applications
Note: The team will also reserve part of the funding to sponsor a Prop House round for applications developers.
Services:
- Throughout development, the team will provide weekly Q&A during office hours, hosted by The Noun Square.
- The team will provide a JavaScript library that makes it easy for front-end applications to query and deploy their own data.
- Finally, we will collaborate with AI Pod, providing the processed and formatted data relevant for training their models.
Deliverables:
Infrastructure Component:
- Nounish decentralized database: We’ll run a Ceramic and ComposeDB node that serves the data through a GraphQL API.
- Scrape/ingest real Nouns data sources: Collect PropHouse, on-chain, Snapshot and Discourse data in near real-time, so that apps can query and compose them through our service.
- Client library for easy integration: Provide a JavaScript library that client applications can use to easily query and publish data.
- Nouner preferences: Deploy a Preferred proposal categories, optional social links, preferred Noun profile image.
- Support and/or integrate with partners and application developers: Work with the community to brainstorm on new and existing models and incorporate feedback.
Note: Part of this work has been started with 15k USD subsidized by the Ceramic builder grants.
Application Component:
- 1st Party, Core Applications: NounsID
- 3rd Party, Core Applications: Builder Profiles
- 3rd Party, Nounish Partner Integrations: Noundry Integration
Services Component:
- Provide ingested, and formatted data for AI Pod
- Provide developers with APIs and a library to leverage permissionless, composable databases as a service.
- Q&A with developers during regularly scheduled office hours on The Noun Square.
Success Criteria
- Uptime: Functional network with availability on-par with centralized database and CRUD API.
- Integrations: Successful Integration with launch partner - Noundry.
- Composability: One or more demonstrable(ideally novel) composable and interoperable application use cases from pre-existing applications in the Nouns ecosystem.
- Partnerships: Number of pre-existing nounish applications that commit, and follow through with network integrations in the ecosystem that leverage the network.
- Data Sources: Amount of data sources integrated, and CRUD operations executed on Ceramic.
Future Work
- Expand data sources to eventually include all relevant data generated in the Nouniverse and make it permissionless and composable, along with publishing relevant metadata from applications running on the network.
- Create developer tools, documentation, and examples to make development easier for developers.
- Partnerships: Coordinate with Voters.wtf, Federation, and Lil Nouns mainsite, ApacheSet(Nouns Metrics), WalletChat (wallet to wallet communication app) for network integration.
Team Structure & Budget
- Infrastructure, NounsID development: Brunes and Champion Score
- Technical Program & Partnership Management: Al409, Baba
- Application Development: Ripe
- Integration Partner: Volky
- Infrastructure costs: Servers, hosting
- Builder Grants: ETH allocation to be used for Prop House rounds, and/or direct developer/builder integrations with Ceramic in order to bootstrap the network effects of our Nounish dataverse.
Note: Builder funds that are not used will be returned to NounsDAO treasury.
Amount per month:
- Brunes (technical lead): 10 ETH/Month
- Champion Score: 8 ETH/Month
- Baba: 8 ETH/Month
- Builder Grants: 7.5 ETH/Month
- Ripe: 3 ETH/Month
- Volky: 3 ETH/Month
- Al409: 3 ETH/Month
- Server Costs: .25 ETH/Month
Amount/Time: 42.75 ETH/Month
Duration: 4 months
Total: 171 ETH